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Graphics Stats Hardware

An Applied Investigation Into Graphics Card Coil Whine 111

Posted by timothy from the like-y'do dept.
jones_supa writes We all are aware of various chirping and whining sounds that electronics can produce. Modern graphics cards often suffer from these kind of problems in form of coil whine. But how widespread is it really? Hardware Canucks put 50 new graphics cards side-by-side to compare them solely from the perspective of subjective acoustic disturbance. NVIDIA's reference platforms tended to be quite well behaved, just like their board partners' custom designs. The same can't be said about AMD since their reference R9 290X and R9 290 should be avoided if you're at all concerned about squealing or any other odd noise a GPU can make. However the custom Radeon-branded SKUs should usually be a safe choice. While the amount and intensity of coil whine largely seems to boil down to luck of the draw, at least most board partners are quite friendly regarding their return policies concerning it.
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An Applied Investigation Into Graphics Card Coil Whine More

An Applied Investigation Into Graphics Card Coil Whine

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  • Is this what is whining in the mac pro 2013 desktops?
    • No idea if it's the GPU; but high-frequency magnetics are all potential culprits (as are low frequencies, though 50/60Hz is usually 'hum' rather than 'whine'), and a modern laptop is just stuffed with DC/DC converters keeping the various ICs fed, so if it isn't the GPU's support system, it's another fairly similar one.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ddtmm ( 549094 )
      I've looked into the Macs and it's similar in that it's coil whine but from the coils in the power supply and not the graphics. Most switching power supplies work at higher frequencies (that is, much higher than 50/60 hz) and produce that sound when the right amount of current passes through them. Many devices using switching supplies (which is most electronics devices) make that sound. All the NEC lcd monitors in our office have a faint whine to them as well, and also power supply related.
      • That is what apple thought before the replaced the power supply and nothing changed. Plus it seems to warble at bit when new colourful things appear on the screen. I can't tell if the data coming in might be the source or the GPU making it happen.

  • Motherboard got fried by lightning, replaced said motherboard, video card now whines.

    I've gotten used to it.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by adolf ( 21054 )

      I used to have a Sound Blaster Pro which had some lightning damage. Something on the board had turned microphonic, and you could shout at the card and hear it through the line output.

      Fun stuff.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      Chances are it's the PSU causing it. That seems to be in at least my experience over the last 20 years, that if you're experiencing some type of coil whine it's related to the PSU--usually a weak rail, or a rail that's failing. This is especially true under heavy load, there are rare cases as mentioned in a lower post of other issues causing it but the majority of the time it's something you can fix on your own. Especially if it happened after a strike.

  • The Cause (Score:5, Informative)

    by labnet ( 457441 ) on Friday November 14, 2014 @05:23PM (#48388469)

    I've designed lots of these little switch mode supplies. (SMPSs)
    The noise comes from the inductors. Inductors are coils of wire around a ferrite. When the current changes through the wire, the wire physically expands and contacts from every other wire. This is the source of the noise. (SMPSs normally switch from 200kHz to 2MHz, so well outside our audio range)
    There are a few things a designer can do.
    1. Encapsulate the coil. This holds the wire tighter together and can minimise noise, but is only usually used in large inductors like those in invertors for UPSs or solar.
    2. Eliminate subsonic oscillation with good multi-pole compensation. Switch mode power supplies have, have first second and third order responses which require filters to damp them. If you don't design these filters well, you can get subsonic oscillation which falls into the audio band. The power supply still regulates OK, but you can get that annoying whine.
    3. Occasionally the noise can also come from a periodic load with that falls into an audio range. More capacitors on the output can help that.

    Also, very very occasionally, it can come from ceramic capacitors that use a high k dielectric that are microphonic, but in my experience it is usually the capacitor acting as a microphone that upsets the circuit.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Actually, it is slope compensation that you want to use to avoid subharmonic oscillation, and you can avoid that need entirely by designing your SMPS such that it never exceeds 50% duty cycle for the design load.

    • Have you ever noticed if this effect gets better depending on the shape? I use transformers in audio amps I build, and often there's a marked difference if I use R-core over EI or Toroid. But this is signal noise and not physical noise. If the transformer is making physical noise, I'd never be able to hear it over my guitar solo :-p

    • Slashdot no longer the place you used to go?
      While it's a bit more mainstream audience than back in the day... you still get great comments like this one from time to time.

      So when you think Slashdot is dead, remember this post.

      • Well said.

        I would also like to thank Hardware Canucks for doing this test in the first place. Like most nerd/geek/freaks, I'm very sensitive to noise, and computer case noise is the worst because you will probably have it for the life of the box...that you use for 10 or 15 hours a day, every day.

        So, thanks. And thanks.

        BTW, it would be kind of awesome if the computer hardware testing sites incorporated sound tests into their general testing of stuff.

        • BTW, it would be kind of awesome if the computer hardware testing sites incorporated sound tests into their general testing of stuff.

          You mean like this:
          Tom's Hardware: Sapphire's Vapor-X R9 290X 8GB - Temperature, Noise And Power [tomshardware.com].

          Actually I continuously get frustrated by "enthusiast" computer sites reviews who seems to being entirely lacking in technical knowledge when it comes to anything beyond quoting the manufacturers press material. Half of them might as well have a companion site reviewing shoes and fashion tends given their display of technical ignorance.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Indeed. There are people here that know their stuff.

    • Re:The Cause (Score:4, Informative)

      by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday November 14, 2014 @09:20PM (#48389475)

      When the current changes through the wire, the wire physically expands and contacts from every other wire.

      Not just the wires. But the core physically changes shape due to magnetostriction [wikipedia.org]. The only was to reduce this is by careful selection of the inductor magnetic material and/or reducing the flux density in the core.

    • Re:The Cause (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15, 2014 @03:39AM (#48390371)

      Full disclosure: I worked on this *exact* issue at NVIDIA for a brief period, although several generations ago. Usual disclosure applies - the below is my opinion, not theirs.

      It doesn't surprise me that the NVIDIA reference cards do pretty well; they took the issue as seriously as some of their customers do. We made some fancy measurements to evaluate different methods of reducing the noise; indeed, some of the "common sense" things a designer can do are actually wrong. For example, #1 from the parent (fill the inductor package with something to keep the coil from moving) isn't necessarily a good idea. In some cases, that actually makes the vibration *worse*; rather than prevent the coil from moving, it helps transmit the motion of the coil to the PCB, which can then act like a sound board, making the tiny coil's vibration into something audible. (The sound board is the part of a musical instrument that is forced by the string to vibrate, making sound. It's what makes an acoustic guitar make noise when a string is plucked, while an electric guitar is relatively silent with no amp.)

      That's not to say that encapsulation is a bad idea necessarily - just that this is a much more difficult problem to solve than you might imagine at first glance. And something that works well for a particular application/GPU/inductor/card combination might not work as well for a different combination.

      A long time ago, I had a PowerBook G4 that had a buzzy whining that I later (while working on this problem) learned was from the inductors. I discovered that by using the CHUD Tools part of Apple's developer tools to disable the "Nap" option (this is the CPU Nap power-saving mode, not the much more recent "Power Nap" marketing-branded feature), the whining would go away, because the current in the inductors was much closer to constant.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Twinbee ( 767046 )
      What would typically be the source of the whine/buzz behind a convector heater (non-fan), and an LCD monitor, and an LED bulb?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        What would typically be the source of the whine/buzz behind a convector heater (non-fan), and an LCD monitor, and an LED bulb?

        Header - surprisingly, AC current on a regular wire heater. The coils of heating element do act like an inductor and cause it to vibrate some. Depending on the mount, that vibration can translate into actual vibration of the chassis causing the buzzes.

        LCD monitor - the switch mode power supply is generally the cause of it. Practically everything with a SMPS is vulnerable to buzzes/wh

    • There are a few things a designer can do.
      1. Encapsulate the coil.

      Is this a thing I can do, say, with epoxy? Do I have to worry about heat?

  • I understand that high-frequency magnetics are at risk of physical oscillation(the detailed math is right over my head; but all it takes is one part of the part attracting or repelling another part of the part, at least under some input waveforms, and you'll potentially see movement, which easily enough turns to sound); but the seemingly obvious solution is just to pot the magnetics in an adequately thermally conductive epoxy or other encapsulant.

    Does anybody know if that just adds too much cost, without performance benefit, and so gets cut during the BOM penny pinching? Do potting compounds have properties that degrade the performance or efficiency of common magnetics? Why is it that, if coil whine is an issue, they aren't just dipping the things in epoxy and calling it a day?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      Because 99.999% of users don't care enough to complain. When you get enough whine that a sizable number of users scream bloody murder, something gets done. But for a more typical amount of supply whine, why spend the extra buck or two? And chances are, it never makes it to the BOM penny pinching stage, because unless the design is producing serious noise, corrective actions probably won't be taken in the first place.

      Besides, assuming you use a standard-shape power supply, the users who really care about

      • The issue is the "PSU" on-board a big graphics card is not replaceable. It's power cirtcuitry that feeds on the order of 200 amps to the GPU and handles huge transients / power and voltage transitions.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Ah. I missed the fact that you were talking about inductors on a DC-DC converter on the graphics card itself. In that case, yeah, that's just shoddy. On the other hand, it is easy to fix:

          1. Buy epoxy.
          2. Remove the card.
          3. ...

          :-)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by unitron ( 5733 )

          The issue is the "PSU" on-board a big graphics card is not replaceable. It's power cirtcuitry that feeds on the order of 200 amps to the GPU and handles huge transients / power and voltage transitions.

          Perhaps you mean 200 Watts?

          • At 1 volt, 200W translates to 200A. The voltage that the chip runs at is normally not much more than 1V. Some (maybe most?) of the coils will be closer to 12V but at some point there will be really high currents.

      • Because 99.999% of users don't care enough to complain.

        That would mean 1 / 100,000 users complain. I think more users care. 99.99% or even 99.9% might be a closer value to the amount of users that don't care.

        Of course I'm just nitpicking and past your point, but there's a surprisingly big difference into how many 9s you slap there. :)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          I guess it depends on how bad the noise is. I could believe one in 10K or one in 100K. I'd have a hard time believing that a manufacturer would ship something with enough noise to bother one in 1K people. Usually I'd expect the noise to be in a frequency range where most adults either can't hear it or can barely hear it.

          • "I guess it depends on how bad the noise is"

            Noise is relative.

            We're putting systems on desktops with near-silent PSU, chassis and CPU fans along with SSDs for booting, but can't quite justify the spend required to put 4Tb (local scratch space for scientific computing) on SSD (you can only do so much inside a $2k/system budget.)

            As a result we've had a couple of people complain about "electrical arcing noise" from their computers, which turned out to be headseek noise when they're grinding on large datasets.

    • Re:Anybody familiar with the manufacturing side? (Score:5, Informative)

      by slew ( 2918 ) on Friday November 14, 2014 @08:43PM (#48389411)

      I understand that high-frequency magnetics are at risk of physical oscillation(the detailed math is right over my head; but all it takes is one part of the part attracting or repelling another part of the part, at least under some input waveforms, and you'll potentially see movement, which easily enough turns to sound); but the seemingly obvious solution is just to pot the magnetics in an adequately thermally conductive epoxy or other encapsulant.

      Does anybody know if that just adds too much cost, without performance benefit, and so gets cut during the BOM penny pinching? Do potting compounds have properties that degrade the performance or efficiency of common magnetics? Why is it that, if coil whine is an issue, they aren't just dipping the things in epoxy and calling it a day?

      Unfortunately mechanical damping of the inductor vibration isn't as effective as simply reducing the amplitude of driving frequency in the audio bands. Remember this is a sub-harmonic that is being excited by a non-linear coupling to the audio frequency. Basically the energy in a higher frequency is being converted into a lower audible mechanical frequency.

      Theoretically, simply changing the mass of the physical oscillation (e.g. cementing it to something heavier) only slightly modifies the frequency of the oscillation (potentially creating more audible noise) and it still doesn't change the energy much. Viscous damping of the mechanical frequency might help a little bit more. Unfortunately, in practice, surrounding things like solder joints in potting compounds is risky as they have a different thermal expansion coefficients and it can cause additional mechanical stress (resulting in reduced mechanical reliability).

      In the end, mechanical means are still not going to be as effective as changing the circuit to reduce the amount of switching energy frequencies which are coupled to the audio frequency bands. Probably even from a total system cost point of view...

    • "but the seemingly obvious solution is just to pot the magnetics in an adequately thermally conductive epoxy or other encapsulant."

      As another poster noted, this can make things worse, especially if the epoxy is rigid.

      Some of the best methods involve potting _part_ of the coil (wax drops) or using rubber o-rings to absorb the motion/sound. The issue then becomes that those parts have to pass thermal energy in order to avoid melting.

      Acoustic noise control in switchmode circuitry is an engineering discipline a

  • I always though the noise from coming from a cap that was ready to explode.

    • Re:To me this is good news (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Zordak ( 123132 ) on Friday November 14, 2014 @07:59PM (#48389279) Homepage Journal
      My anecdotal experience is that sometimes it's a ceramic diode getting hammered by out-of-spec back-voltage and ready to explode, and sometimes it does explode spraying ceramic shards all over the electronics lab. Root causes may include a dodgy transformer (pulled out of an old Hammond organ) with a highly questionable output waveform because you're a broke undergrad and it was cheaper than buying a new one.

  • Like bearing noise in a full-throttle jet engine (Score:3, Funny)

    by idontgno ( 624372 ) on Friday November 14, 2014 @06:03PM (#48388685) Journal
    Are people actually hearing inductor acoustic oscillation over FAN NOISE? If you can hear yourself think over your graphics card, YOU'RE NOT A REAL GAMER!.

  • at least most board partners are quite friendly regarding their return policies concerning it.

    ug.. Coil whine happened to me a few years ago on a brand new card so i RMA'ed the card. At the time it took some convincing to issue the rma too iirc. They shipped me some refurb card that never worked right. And the next one didn't work right (unstable or just plain DOA cant recall). By now Im up to 40 bucks just in shipping these crap cards back to the company. Never did get a working card out of it. The next ca

  • I cannot believe how loud our GTX660's from EVGA are. Wherever you're sitting in whatever country you're in right now, you can probably hear it. Some of our 550ti's and GTX650's are the same. The 650's aren't even high wattage! It's just completely unacceptable. I can hear up to about 40KHz so I've had my fair share of loud electronics that only I can hear. At least this frequency is within normal human range so more people can complain about it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rwa2 ( 4391 ) *

      I have an EVGA GTX 560Ti . My wife finally made me replace my fans.

      They used really cheap fan mounts that vibrate like heck whenever they spin up.

      Just replaced the stock fans with this rig today: http://www.amazon.com/Titan-Ad... [amazon.com]

      Much quieter now.

  • How much internal state information is leaked in the noises?
    • You can probably infer whether the chip is working hard or not, and possibly hear it stepping clock frequencies. Maybe if the frame rate is locked to v-sync, you could also hear a beat frequency synchronous to fps. I don't think you can find out anything more specific than those kind of things. There's a lot of power filtering going on and the chip architecture is extremely complex.

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